Building a Manufacturing Company

On 28 July 2025 Desktop Metal, the metal 3D-printing company from Burlington, Massachusetts, filed for Chapter 11 in the Southern District of Texas. Three months earlier it had been bought by Nano Dimension for about $179.3 million, a purchase Nano had tried to avoid until the Delaware Court of Chancery ordered it to close; Nano said the decision to file was taken by Desktop Metal's independent board (reported). About five weeks after the filing, its core US assets, including the ExOne printer business it had bought in 2021, were sold to Arc Impact Acquisition Corp for about $7 million, and its European and Japanese units went to an affiliate of Anzu Partners, a sale whose closing had not been confirmed at the time of writing (reported). Some customers' installed printers were left without a full-service owner (reported).

The company had been founded in 2015 by Ric Fulop, a co-founder of the battery maker A123 Systems, which had listed in September 2009 and filed for Chapter 11 on 16 October 2012, with MIT professors including Ely Sachs, one of the pioneers of binder-jet printing (reported). Its pitch was that metal printing, then dominated by slow and expensive laser machines, could be made cheap enough for engineering offices and fast enough for mass production, by jetting a binder across a bed of metal powder and sintering the parts in a furnace. Some of the best-known names in venture capital funded it, with about $400 million or more of private money by 2019 (reported). In December 2020 it listed through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, Trine Acquisition, at about $2.5 billion (the basis is reported differently in different sources), and in February 2021, with its shares above $30, its market value reached about $10 billion (reported).

It then used its cash and its shares to buy revenue. It completed the purchase of EnvisionTEC, a maker of dental and polymer printers, on 16 February 2021, and of ExOne, whose binder jets printed sand moulds for foundries, on 12 November 2021 for about $561.3 million, $8.50 in cash and $16.43 in Desktop Metal stock for each ExOne share (8-K, reported), along with a series of smaller companies. Organic growth did not follow the plan that had justified the listing; as the companion's study of additive manufacturing puts it, the projections "assumed adoption curves that had never been observed". Customers qualified printed metal parts slowly, because each one had to match the properties and tolerances of the casting or machined part it replaced, and machines bought to evaluate the process ran a few days a month. By 2023 the shares traded at about $1 or less. An all-stock merger with Stratasys, agreed in May 2023, failed at Stratasys's shareholder meeting on 28 September 2023; Nano Dimension agreed in July 2024 to pay $5.50 a share in cash, about $183 million, then, under new leadership, refused to sign the national-security agreement the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States required, until the Delaware court found on 24 March 2025 that it had materially breached the merger agreement and ordered it to complete it (law-firm commentary on the opinion; reported). The b